Today, when I went to boot one of the development environments on my laptop, I was greeted by a fun message:

the-cloud:dev wwalter$ vagrant up [default] VM already created. Booting if it's not already running... [default] Clearing any previously set forwarded ports... [default] Forwarding ports... [default] -- 22 => 2222 (adapter 1) [default] Creating shared folders metadata... [default] Clearing any previously set network interfaces... [default] Booting VM... [default] Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes. The VM failed to remain in the "running" state while attempting to boot. This is normally caused by a misconfiguration or host system incompatibilities. Please open the VirtualBox GUI and attempt to boot the virtual machine manually to get a more informative error message.

I popped open the VirtualBox GUI as the error message suggested, and ended up with a slightly less helpful version:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine dev_1340310725. Failed to load VMMR0.r0 (VERR_SUPLIB_WORLD_WRITABLE). Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005) Component: Console Interface: IConsole {1968b7d3-e3bf-4ceb-99e0-cb7c913317bb}

As it turns out, /Applications on my MacBook had somehow been set to be world-writable.. I'm not sure what application I would have installed that caused this, but it's definitely not cool. Anyway, easy fix is to run Disk Utility and Repair Permissions.

Permissions differ on “Applications”; should be drwxrwxr-x ; they are drwxrwxrwx . Repaired “Applications”